What Does It Feel Like To Be a Track Official?

Even at the high school level, pressures come from all sides.

On April 5, I was asked to help officiate a big high school track meet. I had no ties to any of the schools involved, and I didn’t have anything else pressing to do, so I figured it was a good opportunity to give back to the sport.

When I accepted, I said I was a track guy. But when I arrived, I discovered that I’d been put on discus. Not just on it, but in charge of it. I had 15 minutes to dash back to my car, grab my computer (which, luckily, I’d brought with me) and frantically word search the 2014 rulebook for every reference to “discus” I could find. Then it was time for an officials’ meeting, during which I discovered I would be expected to strictly enforce the high school uniform rules—key among which is “no jewelry.”

But what’s jewelry? In the brief minute or two at my disposal, I asked every question I could think of. Yes, eyeglasses were OK. (Anything else would have made no sense.) So were watches (not as obvious for discus). But when the competitors arrived, what I found was something I’d never thought of: a scattering of hair bands and one decorative bow.

I was, basically, going to have to wing it. Not that this was a new experience: I’d officiated track before, and frequently I had to learn by doing. With officials in such short supply, it wasn’t the first time I’d found myself in charge of an event far from my own experience. In some cases, I’d been the only adult on scene.

If it’s bling, I said, get rid of it, which meant the bow had to go. But keeping your hair out of your eyes is useful, so something had to be legal. I told them that as long as it wasn’t decorative, I wasn’t going to object. (I later had time to look up the rule, and found out that while it’s a bit more specific than that, “no bling” was a pretty good approximation.)

For most of them, though, the question wasn’t hair. It was what counted as competing in uniform—and when exactly did they have to dump their warm-ups. It was cold and raining. Could they wear stocking caps? Tights?

Again, I had no clue. I had not signed up to make decisions like that.

But here’s where the first of two really cool things happened. I admitted that I normally worked college meets, where the rules were different. But until someone higher up tells us otherwise, I said, here’s how we’ll do it. And when someone higher up did pass by and gave me a chance to pester him with questions that made me change my procedures, none of them objected. They just wanted to compete.

Unfortunately, other things didn’t go quite so simply.

The main problem was the discus cage. It was tucked into a corner of the infield, right near the start of the 200 meters. From the beginning, wild throws tended to go over the net. One of the places they went was into what would later be the shot put staging area. Another was into what would later be the staging area for the 3,000.

The result was a sequence of delays, first while I consulted with the shot put judge, and repeatedly halted my own event to shoo his kids out of the danger zone, and later when the track folks began running what seemed like an endless succession of 3K heats.

Meanwhile, I was starting to take flak from discus coaches. “We’ve been here since 8:30 in the morning!” one yelled. “They’re varsity! They’re not going to throw it over there! They’ve got a rhythm going and you're ruining it!"

I’ve been yelled at by coaches before, but never quite like this. I suddenly understood the pressure that officials at indoor nationals might have felt, earlier this year in Albuquerque, when faced with determined protests. Most officials are people like me: volunteers, or people paid honorariums that might amount to half of minimum wage. And at the high school and college level, the coaches are the ones who decide who to use as officials for future meets. Alienate the wrong person and you could get blackballed.

I don’t know how other officials react. Me, I dug in my heels. In the prior flight, varsity throwers had indeed been landing throws right in the region where 3K finishers were now collecting their sweats. The throwers in my current flight, in fact, were acutely aware of that.

My first thought, fine. I never, ever, ever want to do this again. I know a soup kitchen that needs volunteers—and the homeless are a lot more pleasant than some coaches.

But later, I remembered the second cool thing—a truly transcendent moment, actually.

Part of officiating throws is looking for foot fouls. In some events, like javelin or long jump, it’s easy, but in anything where they spin, one person simply can’t see everything. Sometimes your view is obstructed by the rest of the athlete’s body.

It was on one of those occasions when one of the other athletes called “foul.” I turned, thinking I was going to have to explain that I couldn’t call a foul based on another competitor’s say-so, but to my astonishment, it was the thrower’s teammate. A moment later, after conferring with him, the thrower agreed. In effect, he’d just called a foul on himself.

I’d never seen anything like it before. Later, he shrugged it off. “I wouldn’t want it if I didn’t deserve it,” he said, as though that should be utterly self-evident.

And that, I suspect, is why someday I’ll again find myself standing in the rain officiating an event I know way too little about. It won’t be for the school. It won’t be for the coaches. It will be for the athletes. Because ultimately, all they want to do is compete.